The Contemporary Photobook Magazine
Review by Steve Harp • In that distant era – seemingly so long ago, yet in many ways the world in which we still live – of the onslaught of the COVID-19 virus, all of our lives were shattered and altered in ways we are still crawling from and trying to understand. In that now... Continue Reading →
Review by Steve Harp • I discovered the work of Ragnar Axelsson in a slim volume I came across in a small photo bookstore/gallery in Reykjavik in 2014. A part of the Photo Poche Series, published by Crymogea, it was titled simply Ragnar Axelsson. I loved the book’s compact size – it suggested to me nothing so much as a sketchbook,... Continue Reading →
Review by Melanie Chapman • Why would someone carry a 258-page hardcover photobook with them across an ocean and throughout four countries when much of the photographer’s work is accessible on-line? When the book is the new retrospective Vivian Maier published by Thames and Hudson, the only appropriate response is “Why Not?!” - As the “someone” who... Continue Reading →
Reviewed by Madhu Joseph-John • This is what you might first see when you have Pradip Malde’s photo book in your hand: women, young and old, some with head covers, some with razor blade in hand, others grinding a clay like mass with stones, girls with their legs splayed and being held down by women, acacia... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • Arab Spring. The Mexican-U.S. border crises. Ongoing strife in Africa. And now the exodus from Ukraine to escape the Russian assault. What to do with all these refugees? Germany, in the wake of the wave of emigration caused by Arab Spring uprisings in 2015, emerged as a beacon of hope by... Continue Reading →
Review by Melanie Chapman • The mystery that is India, “where you can touch what is most essential, where life and death are always side-by-side.” This is the subject of the new photobook by renowned colorist Harry Gruyaert, representing a dozen trips made over the span of forty years. In his introduction, Magnum photographer Gruyaert reflects on... Continue Reading →
Review by Steve Harp • As I looked through Ara Oshagan’s 2021 monograph displaced, for some odd reason I was reminded of James Agee’s 1941 study of tenant farming in the American south, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. There is a surface level of similarity in that both books are, in a sense “documentary” - considerations of the lives of... Continue Reading →
Review by Wayne Swanson • The hills and hollers along the Appalachian Mountains running down the eastern United States are steeped in folklore and folkways. In From Yonder Wooded Hill, photographer Riley Goodman spins a narrative tale from his experiences there and the stories he heard growing. Drawing from his own photos, archival images, short passages of text and poetry,... Continue Reading →
Review by Brian F. O’Neill • The origin of the term mise-en-scène, while it is now most commonly used within media and cinema studies, is attributed to the French writer Alexandre Dumas. Dumas financed and helped design his Château de Monte-Cristo in Port-Marly, France on the outer suburban fringe of Paris, and in so doing named it... Continue Reading →
Review by Rudy Vega • Japan is a country of four distinct seasons. Hot, humid and rainy summers followed by mild pleasant autumn complete with fall colors. Then winter sets in for four months of frigid cold snowy weather. But with the arrival of spring comes renewal as symbolized by the cherry blossoms or Sakura as... Continue Reading →
PhotoBook Journal 